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Government Privacy Security United States

US Goverment Employees Targetted By New 'GovRAT' Malware (computerworld.com) 30

Security researchers have detected an upgrade to the GoVRAT malware, which targets government employees and bypasses antivirus tools using stolen digital certificates. An anonymous reader quotes Computerworld: Through GovRAT, hackers can potentially steal files from a victim's computer, remotely execute commands, or upload other malware to the system... The malware features an additional function to secretly monitor network traffic over the victim's computer -- something with scary consequences. "If you're downloading something from a particular resource, the hackers can intercept the download and replace it with malware," said InfoArmor CIO Andrew Komarov on Friday.

Last year, InfoArmor said that earlier versions of GovRAT had attacked more than 15 governments around the world, in addition to seven financial institutions and over 100 corporations.
The security researchers say GovRAT comes with "a stolen database of 33,000 Internet accounts, some of which belong to U.S. government employees," including names, email addresses and hashed passwords.
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US Goverment Employees Targetted By New 'GovRAT' Malware

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Karma is a bitch, eh....

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Good job mods.

  • by Snotnose ( 212196 ) on Sunday September 11, 2016 @07:57PM (#52868449)
    Oh, wait, we do. The NSA. Their job should be to find these vulnerabilities, notify the vendor, and help keep us all safe. Too bad our current USA government is so corrupt simple things like this simply don't happen.
    • Because the NSA wants to use GovRAT themselves!

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      The NSA, GCHQ, CIA want to see who is looking for what on wide open, junk private sector contractor supported US gov networks.
      The huge hope is that someone interesting will look for a project or name on a gov network and expose the real origins of such hidden information.
      What really happened is the plain text US networks are left so wide open that anyone can log in and look around, save all data found in bulk, plain text or test malware on a huge scale. Why risk a live search and real time detection, jus
  • by khz6955 ( 4502517 ) on Monday September 12, 2016 @01:08AM (#52869175)
    "GoVRAT malware, which targets government employees"

    Slashdot is getting as bad as the rest of the technical press. As in choking on the words Microsoft Windows in relation to malware. If the NSA hadn't expended so much effort in diluting security on Microsoft Windows then we wouldn't be in this mess.

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